


theories about the nature of the thing

by misandrywitch



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Aliens, Character Study, Dreams, Memories, Season/Series 03 Spoilers, whatever this is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-11
Updated: 2017-06-11
Packaged: 2018-11-12 16:12:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11165409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misandrywitch/pseuds/misandrywitch
Summary: Lovelace closes her eyes and everything goes dark.When she opens them again, everything is different.





	theories about the nature of the thing

**Author's Note:**

> ive never written w359 fic & i figured, well, the apex of s4 is as good a fucking time as any binch get it done & THEN of fucking course they drop a 2-hour long lovelace epic & it was like someone lit a fire in my brain. the convo eiffel & lovelace have takes place right after their planning sesh in 'desperate times' 
> 
> thx cait for inspiring some of this very vague introspection into what the hell the dear listeners are like & also for catching my wandering commas. 
> 
> title is from 'the language of birds' by richard siken: The fear: that nothing survives. The greater fear: that something does. The night sky is vast and wide. 
> 
> if you need a soundtrack for this fic i recommend 'up the wolves' on repeat six or seven times. 'i'm gonna bribe the officials. i'm gonna kill all the judges. it's gonna take you people years to recover from all of the damage'
> 
> junosteeled.tumblr.com!!! who is ready to die on monday!!!

 

 

_There’s the story, then there’s the real story, then there’s the story of how the story came to be told. Then there’s what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too._

_-_ Margaret Atwood,  _Maddaddam_

 

 

 

 

 

 

By day, she makes deals with the devil, because she knows by now the enemy she knows is better than the one she can’t control, and Isabel Lovelace is a great many things but she has no space to be an idiot. Not anymore.  

At night, she dreams about running circles on the tarmac at West Point in that ratty old sweatshirt she used to steal from her roommate, a battle long-since lost, and how the humidity would soak into her hair, and how quiet it was at 5 a.m. Memories - dreams - it hardly matters, of a life that was, a long time ago and very far away. It feels longer every day. Feels further. The more time passes the less any of it feels like it belongs to her at all. It doesn’t feel like it actually happened. Doesn’t feel real.  

At night, she talks to ghosts. They feel realer than anything else.

 

 

 

 

She remembers the first moment she realized that they - command - didn't really care about any of them up here. Handing her a gun and asking her to shoot someone in the head. Not a real someone, a real person, but it felt real and she looked real and Lovelace looked at her and thought  _She looks disposable_ and it made her feel sick. 

Not long after that, they start dying. Her crew. Her  _friends._ And not long after that, she starts hearing things. 

They trust her, the living and the dead, to get them out of this. They think she's abrasive, sometimes unprofessional. They don't really appreciate her jokes. But they trust her and there is nothing in the entire universe Lovelace can do to help them but try. 

Lovelace looks at them, the remnants of her crew and the backbone of a shuttle craft she doesn’t really believe will ever fly, and she says something that sounds brave. She says, “We will make it through this, I promise. I promise we will.”

She says that a lot, the last few hundred days, until there isn't anybody left to say it to. 

 

 

 

 

 

But that isn’t what she thinks. She looks at them, and she thinks _We are all going to die._

 

 

 

 

 

Most of them do. There have to be better uses for prophecy. She watches the station get smaller in the shuttle’s warped front window made of salvaged glass. Knows, inside, Doctor Selberg is about to join the rest of them, bodies left behind never to be buried the way friends should be buried. Folded flag, coffin in the ground.

Headstones climbing up the hills like ants, in her head. Her own body will just be lost in space if she doesn’t make it. Return to earth as debris, the flaming edge of an asteroid, space dust.

Lovelace doesn’t cry. She’s too angry for that. But she wants to.  

She watches as cryogenic ice, artificial and crystallized, creeps across the glass, the edges of her vision. She doesn’t want it to overtake her. Lovelace closes her eyes and everything goes dark.

 

 

 

 

 

When she opens them again, everything is different.

 

 

 

 

 

Except the Hephaestus, of course. Still there - purgatory, prison, her entire universe collapsed into metal walls and recycled air. She’d always wanted to travel the distance between stars, fast as she could. Suited up, she’d let herself drift and look at the awesome enormity of it. Push off a foothold to go fast, for the thrill of it, or just spin with a tether attaching her to the station.

Now she just paces, traces and retraces, steps she already knows. Get up, get moving, get gone - over and over, rinse. Repeat. Maybe there isn’t anything left in the universe except the star and the ship and the people on it. Maybe they’re all that’s left, a pitiful representation of the human race. She thinks, as her ship docks and she turns over that unfamiliar voice - Lieutenant Commander, a woman’s voice, can’t be possible - that if she could only s _ee over_  the edge of the horizon, the infrared rays and the molecules that make up the ship and everything living and watching and waiting in between the space of space itself, then it would all be real.

There’s two of them. Three. And an AI. A woman with eyes like steel that doesn’t disguise the lines around them, exhaustion and fear and the burden of responsibility. A man whose face is both too young and too old for his features. And _him,_ of course. Cockroach. Refuse even nuclear radiation couldn’t remove.  

Lovelace looks at them, and she thinks _We are all going to die._

 

 

 

 

 

But that was then. And this is now. Can’t confuse the two.

 

 

 

 

 

If someone else was telling this, it would be a miracle.  Awakened with a kiss, the absent princess returns to life! Watch her return, triumphant, to reclaim her kingdom. But the kingdom’s a labyrinthine floating death trap, and there is no triumph in this. There is nothing inside her but anger. Thank you Mario, but your princess got spat out by the cold, dark, emptiness of space and has no reason to live beyond the fierce, horrific desire to give them what’s coming to them.  

Maybe it’s a curse. Maybe they’re all of them hexed to return here, Groundhog Day, until the heat death of the universe and her desire for revenge is just another reason to get out of bed in the morning.

 

 

 

 

 

She knows what it is, though. This is a war story. And war stories don’t end happily. Folded flags, coffins in the ground. Five more names - six, seven, eight because if there’s one thing Lovelace can promise it’s that they will all go down together. Like sailors lost at sea, still fighting their mutiny.

Poetic. In a way.

The napalm, a little less so. It’s a means to an end, but she’s almost relieved when the Doug Eiffel Nonsensical Morality Brigade puts its foot down. If only because there’s something about the resiliency of humanity’s stubbornness even when they should know better to stick to the things that matter. Welcome to the U.S.S. Hephaestus Station, check your morals at the airlock - but they’re defying conventions, and there’s something almost admirable about that. 

Life finds a way.

 

 

 

 

 

What was that from? Someone’s favorite movie. Maybe.

 

 

 

 

 

They plan like rebels under fire in a foxhole, and then they go their separate ways. Minkowski leaves before Eiffel can say a word to her, and Hilbert leaves before Lovelace can say a word to him, and it leaves the two of them staring at each other in the corridor.

“I know, I know,” he says, and Lovelace raises her eyebrows. “I blew a hole in your ‘Blowing a hole in the side of the ship’ plan. You can go on and tell me I made a big, dumbass mistake."

 _Pryce and Carter 325,_ a voice in her head supplies, helpfully, _An error is not a disaster until you repeat it._ That one needs some work, she thinks, because the definition of disaster is a lot broader and more final, up here. But it almost makes her smile, anyway, because that little voice in her head still sounds an awful lot like Sam Lambert. She very nearly says it out loud to see his reaction, but -

This is a different man, doing a similar job. It strikes her suddenly how opposite they are, Eiffel and Lambert, how they’d probably hate each other. She’s sure Eiffel’s internal _Pryce and Carter_ sounds a hell of a lot like Renee Minkowski, which is pretty funny in its own right. Another role reversal. The more things change the more they stay the same.

“It was a means to an end,” Lovelace says, because it’s something to say.

“You can just say it’s a stupid plan,” Eiffel says.

“I’ve seen stupider. It’s really not half bad. You’re creative.”

“It’s all the DnD I played as a kid,” Eiffel says. “Permanent damage.” He shrugs. “Anyway,” he says, “let’s be real here, if we’re looking at this whole fuckup as the universe’s most sadistic roleplaying game, then you’re gonna pull through scott free and I’m the one stuck with horrible agony.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Lovelace shakes her head because she can’t tell if it’s a joke, can’t hide the sinking feeling. All for one, one for all - that book her father used to read to her but no, not her father. Someone’s father, anyway, in a language she doesn’t recognize.

“Well,” Eiffel says, “I mean, realistically? You’re the main character in this shit show. Or Minkowski, I guess. I’m comic relief, with this moment of brilliance. If this were _Alien,_ the dramatic irony would be that it all goes wrong, and I die horribly onscreen. Probably so you can make it to safety, right?”

“Luckily,” Lovelace says, “I am not Sigourney Weaver.”

“Could change that,” Eiffel says. “There are some flamethrowers in the armory. I could shave your head.”

“That’s plan B, maybe. If we get desperate.” They’re already desperate. It can only get worse.

“Yeah,” Eiffel says. “I’m gonna go, uh, pretend like everything’s hunky dorey and we’re not Benedict Arnold-ing back here.”

“Watch your step,” Lovelace says.

“Can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” Eiffel says, and he turns by bracing one hand on the wall and spinning a little, pushes off down the corridor.

Lovelace watches him go, not in regulation dress with his coveralls knotted around his waist.

In another life, Lovelace thinks, they could probably be friends. Not this one, which will never allow them the space to exist on the same level. But somewhere. Drinking buddies maybe, except not that because he doesn’t - _and how does she know that, why are she thinking suddenly of a car crash -_ but something. The person she was, before, feels so far-away. She’s died and been transformed into someone else. She wonders if Eiffel has too, if he met the version of himself that existed before this - _B.H., Before Hephaestus, like some kind of Biblical plague_ \- if he’d even know who he was looking at. The things they were, all of them, frozen off and scarred over in the blackness of space.

Lovelace has the sudden urge to say something out loud. Something personal, something left over from the ephemera of who she was that would make him laugh. The last date she went on before she left, with that woman with the ridiculous fake nails. Some of the reprimands she received for impulsiveness. The bawdy military drinking songs she doesn’t remember any more. What her Dad looked like.  

But she doesn’t say that. It no longer feels like it’s her story to tell.

 

 

 

 

 

That was then. This is now.

 

 

 

 

 

“Officer Eiffel,” Lovelace says, to his back. He’s saying something to Hera, looking up and away like he’s really making eye contact with someone rather than just talking to the air. There’s something almost sweetly convincing about it, something earnest. But he turns, eyebrows raised, at the sound of her words. Already bracing himself.

“Yes, Captain?”

Lovelace almost lets it go.

“Don’t know what I want but I know how to get it,” she says, finally. “Ready to destroy some passers-by?”

He stares at her, a beat.

“Well, handcuff them,” she amends, and then he starts laughing. It hits him like a double-take and he doubles over, sends himself spinning for a second before he catches the wall. Lovelace wants to laugh too, almost hysterically, the edge of something wild and desperate. It’s in his surprise.

“No offense,” Eiffel manages, “but I didn’t really expect a Sex Pistols reference out of you at a time like this, Captain. And my number one stick-it-to-the-man song, too.”

“I’d go with Another Brick in the Wall, personally. Or Killing in the Name,” Lovelace says, and Eiffel laughs again, a little.

“Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me,” he says. “Not today, anyway.”

“It’s going to be fine,” Lovelace says. The big speech. What you’re supposed to say. They will all make it out of here, or none of them will. She doesn’t have it in her to leave anyone behind again. She doesn’t have it in her to return alone.

Eiffel cuts her off. It’s a relief. She doesn’t really have it in her, right now, to be comforting. She’s forgotten how. She used to be - once. Right? Or is she thinking of someone else? Eiffel himself?  

“You’re just saying that,” Eiffel says, which surprises her. He does that, on occasion. “I’ve heard that enough times to know that when someone says that it usually means it absolutely won’t. But, hey. It’s a nice thought.”

 

 

 

 

 

It all goes wrong. Of course it does. How, Lovelace thinks, do you always end up here?  

Very clearly, like a prophecy, she knows how this is going to end and she knows what she has to do and she knows - maybe - that her move is the one that matters most. Check and mate. There is nothing left inside her but anger and this is not how this story is supposed to end.

 

 

 

 

 

She closes her eyes, collects herself. She runs circles at West Point in the early morning fog. She sees ice creep across glass. She watches solar flares at the edge of the star from the other side of it. She counts their faces, those who are dead and those will could be - three already, four, five, six, seven, eight - bodies left behind. Never recovered. Some of them have people to return home to. A husband. A kid. The head of Goddard Futuristics, and a long-overdue date with his destiny.

Okay.

She stares down the barrel of a gun. It looks like the final punctuation to a bad joke with no setup. It looks like the period at the end of a sentence.

Lovelace thinks, _We are all going to -_

No.

That was then. This is now. She can hear Eiffel’s heartbeat next to her somehow like it’s escaping the walls of his ribs - live and visceral and real, there in the air, all around them.

 _Not this time._  

“Fuck you,” Lovelace says. She doesn’t close her eyes, this time, and a minute later everything goes dark.

 

 

 

 

 

When she opens them again, everything is different.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm obsessed with the dear listeners & what it must be like to be inside lovelace's head. the bit with the three muskateers is a memory of minkowski's. jurassic park is probably not lovelace's favorite movie. 
> 
> also - lambert & eiffel being dead opposites cracks me up cause they're yet again voiced by the same person. it's the little things.


End file.
